I just noticed this plaque last week, after having walked past it dozens, if not hundreds, of times: I took another photo from the same spot, looking in a different direction: The plaque was placed where Interstate 580 crosses over Grand Avenue, creating a dark, imposing overpass that separates Lake Merritt and Lakeside Park from […]
Wednesday, February 4, 2009
Later this month, a project by Joe Penrod called Orange and Blue will be opening at Oakland’s Swarm Gallery along with works by Jared Clark and Jake Watling as part of the ENTER/EXIT exhibition. I’m not especially tuned into Oakland’s thriving arts community, but I have known Watling for several years (I may have occasion […]
Tuesday, February 3, 2009
Music is central to every single civilization that we know of, with dozens of different uses: there’s religious music, martial music, work songs, play songs. Music is a very powerful force for bonding people together. –Oliver Sacks If you walk past a school near my house at the right time on the right day — […]
A proudly inclusive grocery on East 12th Street in Oakland.
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
I finally got around to reading Samantha Power’s article on Gary Haugen in the January 19th New Yorker. Haugen is a Christian human rights lawyer whose organization represents impoverished and abused people in Cambodia, Kenya, and other countries. Like most of Power’s work, the whole article is worth reading, but one set of statistics snared […]
Wednesday, January 21, 2009
The San Francisco Chronicle had a “Chronicle Watch” feature the other day about one of those solar-powered displays that cities put up to let drivers know how fast they are going (the Chron’s “Journalism of Action” in action!). The display in question, which briefly wasn’t working because its solar battery was dead, happens to be […]
May the light of justice shine upon Oakland: The setting sun shining through and around the Alameda County Courthouse across Lake Merritt.
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
To a lot of people, the words “East Oakland” conjure up thoughts of poverty and crime, liquor stores and drugs, sideshows and Raiders fans, hyphy and scraper bikes. And indeed, you can find all these things in East Oakland, some of them in larger quantities than you might like. What many people in Oakland (and […]
Why go to a march when you can let the march come to you? I was eating lunch at home this afternoon when I started hearing chants of “Fuck the Police” getting louder outside the window. I went down to see what was going on, and it turned out to be a small protest march […]
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To get a dramatic sense of how technological changes have affected journalism over the past 150 years, compare this amazing 1864 photograph showing a New York Herald encampment during the civil war, and this San Francisco Chronicle article about how several bystander videos have allowed anyone in the world to watch the fatal shooting of […]
Every time I talk to someone who works in newspapers, or who used to work in newspapers, the conversation inevitably turns to the fate of the industry. Someone here in Oakland seems to be doing their best to keep newspapers alive: Or maybe no papers get delivered to this address at all. Those colorful boxes […]
Like something out of Lewis Carroll, in Oakland’s chinatown: I couldn’t buy any misfortunes because the fortune cookie factory was closed that day, but I peeked inside and discovered that misfortunes go for a buck fifty a bag — cheaper than kettle corn, and less fattening!